Electronic equipment plays a large role in today's society, and in electronic equipment, electronic components such as integrated semiconductor circuits play a large role. Hundreds of thousands of integrated circuit chips are produced every year. New chips are constantly being designed to provide for faster, more powerful electonic devices to satisfy consumer demand and to provide new technologies to a tech-hungry consumer base.
As new semiconductor chips are designed, they need to be tested and test handlers are tools that automate the testing of semiconductor chips. There are many manufacturers of test handlers and these test handlers are designed and used as production tools, usually used in high volume environments.
High-volume semiconductor manufacturers are geographically dispersed, as are their chip design centers. Depending on their size and other factors, chip manufacturers may have many locations throughout the world where their chips are designed. High volume manufacturing may be performed at places where the design centers are located, but the overwhelming trend today is to have volume manufacturing performed in low labor rate areas of the world, decoupled from the design location. In addition, there is a trend for semiconductor manufacturers to utilize third party sources, or subcontractors to perform much of the volume testing of semiconductor chips. The subcontractors are also concentrated in low labor rate areas of the world. Therefore, usually, design centers are physically remote from high volume production facilities. In fact, a large chip manufacturer may have twenty or more design centers providing designs to twenty or more different manufacturing locations throughout the world. The permutations and combinations of where chips are designed and manufactured can be huge.
One of the roles of semiconductor chip design centers is to provide test programs and related hardware for newly-designed chips to the particular facility that will be manufacturing the electronic components in volume. This helps ensure that quality and reliability levels coming out of the production facilities will be in line with the results predicted by the design centers.
Testing and debugging the performance of the test program and related hardware that will be used at the production locations is another function of the design center. If the design centers do not already have the exact same high-volume test handlers as the production locations, the design centers purchase the same hardware as the production facility for the design centers. Each test handler manufacturer uses a unique set of hardware to effect the proper test of the semiconductor chip. Among other names, this hardware is called a work press by Synax, a blade pack by Seiko-Epson, or a nest by Delta Design® of San Diego, Calif. (a division of Cohu, Inc.), a puck, and possibly others, and is referred to below as a test piece coupler or chip coupler. The production handlers can be very expensive ($200K to $400K), and in a design center, their use is sporadic.